By far the most, widely reported and important protective systems in the lives of young people and particularly in younger children are relationships with other people. And, particularly the relationships with their caregivers, their family, and other people who provide support in their lives. One of the important books on this system these kinds of relationships was written by John Bowlby a long time ago. His masterpiece was called Attachment and Loss and John Bowlby was a clinical individual who worked with children, and we mentioned him before when we were talking about the history of resilient science coming out of World War 2. Bowlby observed a lot of children both during and after the war who lost their parents, or who endured separations from their parents and he began to develop a theory, attachment theory, about a very powerful adaptive system for human development and also in, observed in the development of other social mammals. The attachment system he viewed as universal system for people that had a basis in biological evolution, and it involved to protect the young, to protect the young and the vulnerable from danger. And Attachment Theory argues that during the first year of life human infants form a very special kind of bond with the people that take care of them, the, an attachment bond. And this bond is bidirectional and the caregiver often experiences a strong sense of this bond, along with the young child. But this bond serves many protective functions. For example, when there's something scary happening. When there's a threat of any kind perceived by either the child or the caregiver, both parties will take action and the nature of that action differs depending on how old the child is or where the adult and child are located. But the parent will seek proximity to the child, or whoever the caregiver is in this attachment relationship and the child will also cry out for the caregiver, or seek proximity with the caregiver, if they're able to move. You can see this easily on playgrounds, if you see toddlers, young children on a playground. They may be playing with perfect contentment with a caregiver near by, but if something frightens the child, the child will go running back to the care giver or whoever is taking care of them for comfort and soothing, and then when they calm down again, the child may venture out. The attachment seeking behavior that you see in humans is very pervasive, and it isn't just in young children it's over the life course. And I think it was very striking during the 9/11 terror attack and afterwards that one of the first things that happened after that terror attack is that people all over the world of different ages heard about this and were frightened by it where immediately began to seek contact with their attachment figures. Young and old of all different cultures all around the world. They tried to reached out trying to contact people by phone, by texting, by computer, by any ways that they could to reach out and touch base, make contact with their attachment figures because when this system is activated by fear, we don't feel comfortable again until we know that we are safe or in touch with our attachment figures. So when there's danger, this system springs into action to bring, to bring the pair bond together, and they can protect each other and in young children, the parent plays a huge role in protecting the child from danger. But it's also the case that when the child feels secure in this relationship which provides a sense of emotional security a child will feel comfortable, and will begin to explore the world and play. So this attachment relationship provides what's called a secure base, for learning and you can also observe this on the playground, that when a child feels secure they begin to adventure out to explore the playground, to play, to maybe start to play with other children as they get older. But then if a big scary animal starts approaching them or startles the young child in some way, they'll go running back for reassurance to the caregiver. This is the attachment system at work. It's a very powerful system and it works in other social animals as well as in people. We have attachments throughout our life and the attachment system is so powerful that it takes many different forms. Young children become attached to blankets and other comfort objects that they seem to associate with security and the family. We become attached to our babysitters, our caregivers in the extended family. As we get older, we become attached to friends, romantic partners, and other people that we meet growing up. We also eventually become attached to our own children in attachment relationships. Many people become very closely attached to their pets over the life course and this, pets can play a very important role in comforting and soothing people. But people also are capable of attachment bonds in a spiritual sense with spiritual figures or a sense of community with the greater planet. We also can form attachment bonds with a cultural group, with our country, or even with our favorite World Cup team. These attachment relationships play a very powerful and important role in resilience and they provide two kinds of protection or help for children. One is emotional when, when children have good attachment figures and feels secure. They feel more comfortable. They feel more secure. They feel safer and in addition, people that are in these kinds of attachment relationships also play a more instrumental role in protecting children during adversity. They actually take action to provide help. Parents try to help their children. Communities try to help people that live in that community and also, as we get older, people in these kind of attachment relationships will try to help each other. And they help each other in practical ways, as well as emotional ways. So parents play a critical role, and other caregivers who are functioning like parents in the lives of children. They not only protect children in the sense of these attachment relationships, but they also nurture the development of the child's own adaptive systems. Parents play many roles in nurturing a healthy human brain in a child and also in passing on their wisdom and their cultural beliefs about how to deal with difficulties in life. There is a growing science, now, of about the nature of attachment, the biology and neuroscience of attachment and a very interesting book that was published recently is called The Biochemistry of Love and this book summarizes a lot of the evidence on. The hormone oxytocin and other chemicals in mammals that seem to play a critical role in these attachment systems, involved in both attachment bonding and stress and I think it's very interesting and important that these chemicals play a role both in, close bonding in animals and humans, and they also play a role in stress regulation. We know from very many experiments with lots of animal models that parenting behavior can change not only behavior in humans and animals, but also the biology of humans and animals. So there's famous exper, experiments by the group led by Michael Meaney. His work has shown that high-licking behavior by rat mothers, this is a kind of good mothering in rat mothers they lick their pups. If you have a high-licking mother this is very protective. It plays a, a positive role in the development of a pups, rat pups and not only for your own biological rat pups. But, they do experiments where they place foster pups with a high-licking mother and that mother's behavior will alter the biology, the gene expression. Of the rat pups, and then they will grow up to be more adaptive often, in many ways. There's also very interesting research with human families. Phil Fisher has done exciting work to try to improve the care by foster parents. When you have foster children moving into a household, he has developed an intervention to train foster parents and has shown in experimental research with a control group that parents who were trained to be good foster parents will. Are able to regulate the stress biology of foster children. Foster children often have stress systems that have been disturbed by adversity and good foster parents can normalize the biology, the biological rhythms of children, the way their systems. Their HPA stress-regulation systems are working. So, these are exciting areas of research trying to understand the bio, biological underpinnings of some of these adaptive systems in relationships. This is a photograph, taken during a summer school on resilience not long ago, and next time we're going to talk about family, how family matters in resilience, and family resilience itself and you'll get an opportunity to meet [INAUDIBLE] [SOUND]
